By choosing flat shapes that will unfold into forms that produce movable legs – a subset of the art called rigid origami – the team simply had to work out how to get its morphing machine to automatically unfold and crawl.

Make your own Transformer

First, they chose an origami shape that can be easily folded into a four-legged design – it looks butterfly-like. Instead of using paper, however, they took a sheet of shape memory plastic that changes shape when heated, and used a laser cutter to make an overlay of copper tracks that sit along all the necessary origami folds in the plastic. They then fixed two microcircuits – both including a motor and a battery unit – to either side of the machine.

To make the robot unfold, the copper tracks are heated in a set sequence dictated by a microcontroller after the batteries are connected, drawing the legs into shape, and then making the robot stand up. Once the robot is fully unfolded, the motors engage with gears – and the legs walk. With proper programming of the microcircuits, the robot can turn, too.

The researchers hope that search robots based on the principle could one day be inserted into small spaces – perhaps dropped there by a hovering drone – unfold itself into a crawling form, and then seek out locations of survivors amidst, say, earthquake wreckage.

New trend

Wood believes the robot's whole manufacturing process can one day be automated – making it truly self-assembling – with the addition of printable circuits and batteries that other research teams are working on. "The underlying steps required to make the structure have been designed to be easily automated," he says.

"I think what this Harvard team have done is great," says Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK. While the robot might sound a tad cute, he says there is a serious engineering reason to make robots that can self-organise without being told how to do so by a computer. It's part of a new trend called "morphological computation", he says.

"If you're clever, you can design the material so that its shape is in charge of the robot's self-organisation rather than a complicated and expensive computer. That is precisely what they have done here – it is promising stuff."

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.